Dou Yi's face, usually a mask of serene focus, broke into a smile. It was not the cool, confident curve from before. It was brighter, livelier, touched with the genuine thrill of a discovery. "This is our chance," she said, her voice carrying a new energy. "If it felt the need to use even a basic understanding of Jingdao… then it felt *threatened*. We can do this." For a moment, she looked less like an untouchable prodigy and more like a girl their own age, exhilarated by the sheer scale of the challenge before her.
The words were a spark. No one spoke in agreement, but they all moved. The air shifted from desperate defense to a focused, collective assault.
But this time, the looks they cast at Juxian held a new weight. Of all of them, he alone had made the titan's limb go dead and fall. The whispers about the **Jingdao of the Agile Mountain** being just a story died in their throats. Seeing it was one thing. Seeing it *work* against an Adult Beast was something else entirely. What truly surprised them was the effortless, terrible grace with which he used it—not as a blunt hammer, but as a surgeon's scalpel that severed the will from the flesh.
Gen's arms trembled slightly, but not from fear. It was a tremor of pure, unadulterated excitement. The raw power and skill on display—Ning's impossible precision, Dou Yi's overwhelming control, Juxian's esoteric might—it didn't intimidate him. It poured fuel on the furnace inside him. *This,* he thought, *this is the level.*
The False Deity watched them regroup. Then, with a grinding sound like continents shifting, it began to gather its countless arms closer to its torso, coiling them like a nest of stone vipers preparing to strike.
The cultivators answered with greater intensity.
Ning stood his ground, his blindfolded face a portrait of absolute concentration. He raised his hand again. **Shidow** gathered, condensing into the invisible, vibrating blade around his fingers. He did not move. He simply struck the air before him. **Silent Departure**.
*Ping.*
A tiny, bright spark flashed on the same golden-reinforced arm that had blocked Gen.
He struck again. And again.
*Ping. Ping. Ping.*
Each strike was a masterpiece of focused power, each impact landing on the exact same point no larger than a coin. It was like watching a master blacksmith tempering a divine weapon—strike after precise strike. The resonant *pings* became a rapid, ringing chorus. With each one, the golden light on that spot flickered. A scratch appeared. Then the scratch deepened into a crack. On the seventeenth strike, the sound changed—a deeper, harsher *CRACK*. The massive arm did not break, but it jerked back violently from the point of impact, as if stung.
High on his reconstructed **Cloud Juggernaut**, Baili Feng's face was dark. The memory of his cloud being casually swatted aside burned in his mind. *How?* The question was a silent scream. How could Baili Feng, heir to the Stag, be thrown aside like an afterthought? His pride, wounded, became fuel. He poured more of his will, his unyielding sense of superiority, into the cloud. It swelled, darkening from grey to thunderhead black. Silver veins within it crackled with raw energy, turning the mass into a localized thunderstorm that rumbled with his simmering fury. He didn't just send it forward; he commanded it to *strike*.
A single, colossal bolt of silver-white lightning, thick as an ancient tree, forked down from the heart of the Juggernaut. It wasn't pure energy; it was solidified arrogance given destructive form.
The False Deity did not block with one arm. It crossed three of its reinforced limbs in a layered shield before its core.
***KA-BOOOOOM!***
The lightning detonated. The shockwave flattened the remaining water in the basin and sent stones tumbling down the valley slopes. When the light faded, the three arms were scorched black, smoke rising from them, but they held. They had been forced to commit.
From the ground, Liang felt the surge of power from the others like a physical wind. The gap between him and them—between his stumbling foundations and their soaring peaks—yawned wide and terrifying. He did not want to be left behind. Not by Gen, not by anyone. Gritting his teeth, he poured every ounce of his focus into the **Kalash of Elements**. He reached past the basic flames and waters, into a deeper, more volatile layer of its power. From the dark mouth of the vessel, a pure, searing bolt of **white lightning** erupted. It was not as vast as Baili's storm-born strike, but it was needle-sharp, terrifyingly concentrated. It lanced across the battlefield and struck the same arm Ning had been chipping away at.
The lightning did not explode. It *pierced*. It drilled through the golden reinforcement in a shower of sparks and bit deep into the obsidian stone beneath. A sharp, pained groan—a sound of grinding rock and distressed energy—rumbled from the False Deity's form. Liang staggered back, panting, his eyes wide at what he had just done.
Juxian flowed through the chaotic aftermath. He moved with the **Agile Mountain** principle, his body a liquid evasion between the flurry of arms sent to crush him. He condensed his Jingdao to its utmost limit, his form seeming to gain the weight of the world while moving like water. His palm, glowing with that terrible, heavy light, found another swinging arm. He did not push it away. He simply laid his hand upon it.
The result was the same, but more violent. The golden reinforcement flickered and died under his touch. The stone beneath did not just go limp; it *shattered* from the inside out, exploding into a cloud of gravel and dust from the wrist down. The False Deity's understanding of Jingdao was a vague mimicry. Against the true, profound essence of the principle as practiced by a master like Juxian, it was paper against stone.
Annoyance turned to aggravation within the titan. Ten of its largest arms, including the one Liang had pierced, drew back. Then, in a single, synchronized, and overwhelmingly aggressive motion, they swept forward in a horizontal arc meant to scour the entire battlefield clean.
Everyone retreated. Gen, Liang, Ning, Juxian—they all leapt or slid back, putting distance between themselves and the crushing tide of stone.
Everyone except Dou Yi.
The young girl from the Doom College stood her ground. For the first time, all the other cultivators truly *looked* at her, not as a talented peer, but as a focal point of terrifying power.
She raised both hands. The playful, lively light was gone from her eyes, replaced by an iron will. She did not manipulate the mountain energy this time. She pulled from something deeper, something within herself—an intense, consuming desire to dominate, to command, to *break* what opposed her. **Shidow** flared from her not as controlled streams, but as a raging corona.
From that corona, it was born. The **Doom Dragon**.
It was not the formless serpent of manipulated force Baili had faced. This was a true construct of annihilating intent. It erupted before her, a coiling, thrashing monstrosity of violent grey and black force, fifty feet long. Jaws of condensed malice snapped soundlessly, and its very presence made the air weep and distort. As the ten sweeping arms descended upon her, Dou Yi didn't flinch. She was preternaturally calm.
The Doom Dragon moved. It did not attack the arms separately. It coiled around Dou Yi in a protective spiral, then *expanded* outward in a single, explosive pulse of force.
***CRUNCH-GROAN-SHATTER.***
The sound was of a world ending in a localized spot. The ten arms did not simply stop. They were met, crushed, and repulsed by the dragon's expanding coils. The reinforced stone cracked, splintered, and was thrown back. Seizing the moment, Dou Yi's eyes locked on the False Deity's torso. She pointed.
"Bite."
The Doom Dragon's head snapped forward. It was not a physical bite, but a conceptual one. The space around the deity's midsection *imploded* with the force of the dragon's closing jaws. A crater of shattered clay and obsinson erupted on its body.
The **False Deity** took a single, heavy step backward. The earth trembled.
On his cloud, Baili Feng bit his lower lip hard enough to draw a bead of blood. He remembered the girl Mei, who had used a pale shadow of this skill. What he had faced then was a trickle. This was the flood. He couldn't even say he had fought the Doom Dragon before. He had fought a child's drawing of it.
Juxian landed lightly nearby, his stern expression melting into one of genuine, awe-struck delight. "Incredible," he breathed, his eyes wide. "I have never seen such power in a figure so… so not a muscular stone-ape. The Peaks of Mourning could learn a thing or two about presentation."
Lorel, picking herself up from where she'd been blown, watched the scene. She saw how Gen, how all of them, looked at Dou Yi in that moment. It wasn't lust. It was pure, unadulterated *respect*. A recognition of supreme power and skill. It was a look Lorel realized, with a sharp pang, she craved more than any tender glance.
Seeing it, Gen gripped his bamboo, the urge to charge back in blazing through him. But as his foot shifted forward, the realization crashed down like one of the deity's own fists.
With only **Shidow**… he could not win this competition.
Not against Baili's thunderous **Cloud Juggernaut**, born of absolute pride. Not against Juxian's **Agile Mountain**, a principle made flesh. Not even against Dou Yi's **Doom Dragon**, the manifestation of a will to dominate. They were too far ahead. The techniques he could muster with manipulation alone were tricks and speed. Against this level of cultivated, deeply personal power, they were gusts of wind against a fortress wall.
A hot, familiar anger boiled in his stomach—the same frustrated, helpless anger he'd felt when his **Jingdao** had been sealed. The pain of limitation, of being *less*, carved at him.
Among the distant observers, the mood had shifted entirely. The silent, calculating figures like Li Zhan and the other elites were no longer just watching a spectacle. They were taking notes, their eyes cataloging the key players.
"Did you see that? The Juggernaut's lightning…"
"The Doom College… they have bred a true monster."
"They might actually do it. They might force a retreat."
The whispers were no longer dismissive. They were awed, speculative, ablaze with possibility.
"That Baili Feng is a living tempest!"
"The one with the jar… his technique is inhuman."
"And the Doom College girl… she's the real spearhead."
The talk was of victory, of making history by repelling an Adult Beast.
But on the battlefield, the atmosphere changed.
The **False Deity** straightened. The playful smirk was gone. It radiated a different vibe now—not annoyance, but a cold, focused intent. It stopped trying to swat them away. It brought its thousands of arms in close, crossing them before its body in a complex, flowing pattern. Its palms pressed together, separated, then clapped again, moving faster and faster. It was not a prayer, but a casting—a vile, physical incantation. The speed increased until the arms were a blur, and the air around the titan began to *cry*, a high-pitched, tearing shriek as space itself was stressed by the motion.
Then, it happened.
There was no grand light, no named technique. One moment, the air was screaming. The next, Gen knew only two things.
They were all bleeding from a hundred shallow, razor-thin cuts that appeared simultaneously across their bodies.
And the world was nothing but blinding, shattered light and a noise that was the end of sound.